What Trump's bizarre Iowa tirade looked like up close

I drove up to Fort Dodge, Iowa, from Des Moines Thursday night in search of the Donald Trump magic that has so captivated voters here and nationwide. What I found was a festival of the bizarre and a Trumpian rant for the ages.

Lines to get into the Trump rally at the Iowa Central Community College stretched deep into the parking lots as hawkers peddled “Make America Great Again” hats, T-shirts and buttons. The faithful, an almost uniformly white and largely blue-collar crowd, braved strong winds and chilly temperatures as they clutched Trump’s latest book and waited to crowd into the small arena.

Story Continued Below

“I like him because he says what everyone else is thinking but won’t say,” said Lindie Phipps, a self-described “poor dirt farmer” from Boxholm, Iowa, population 200. “I love the immigration stuff and his confidence and strength.”

Phipps’s wife Julie, who runs a catering business, said Trump would take the country back for average Americans. “It’s supposed to be ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Government.’ He’s rich and hasn’t had to go through our struggles, but he understands us.”

Inside, the scene was more sedate as the 1,500 attendees slipped into the two-tiered auditorium. And then the wait began. An acapella group sang the national anthem. A solider led us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Trump was running late. Local and school officials occasionally popped up to offer remarks and pledge that Trump would take questions from the crowd, something he never ended up doing.

Then Trump, fresh from a CNN interview in which he likened Ben Carson's “pathological temper” to incurable “child molesting,” sauntered onto the stage and began an epic tirade that, if it came from anyone else, would amount to a campaign killer. From Trump? Who knows.

The real estate billionaire, working without any kind of script or even a basic framework, launched into a rambling series of rants about illegal immigration punctuated by signing books, reading his own tweets, talking about his cuff links and telling often incomprehensible stories. “Does anyone care about borders?” Trump asked. “Without borders, we don’t have a country. What is it?”

Shortly after this, he talked about his experience with Macy’s, though it was not clear why. “I did very well with ties, shirts, fragrances and all that.” At one point, singling out a man who called out from the audience, Trump said, “Even though you are male, I love you, never been my thing, but I love you. I love everybody.”

It got much stranger very quickly as Trump railed against “anchor babies” and mocked the political correctness of calling the children of immigrants anything else. And he went into a long attack on Bowe Bergdahl, saying he would have let the Taliban keep him. It was like being stuck at Thanksgiving dinner with a garrulous relative who won't stop talking.

And Trump was just getting started.

Toward the end, he went back into the attack he started on CNN, going on for 10 minutes on Carson's incurable "disease." Of Carson's many tales in his book, Trump asked, "How stupid are the people of Iowa, how stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?"

Trump, with great drama, mocked Carson's description of attacking a classmate with a knife, only to have the blade break on the supposed victim's belt buckle. "But lo and behold, it hit the belt! It hit the belt," Trump said, arms stretching outward. "And the knife broke. Give me a break. Give me a break. Give me a break. The knife broke."

Stepping away from the lectern, Trump demonstrated how his belt would move upward or downward if it were struck by a knife, inviting members of the audience to try it out. "It moves this way, it moves that way!" Trump said. "How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?"

The crowd, possibly annoyed that Trump started late, only occasionally interrupted with big cheers. And as the rally went longer and Trump got stranger and deeper into the Carson tirade, the cheers were fewer and some people shifted nervously in their seats and shook their heads to each other. Not everyone in the crowd was already a Trump supporter.

Several told me they were on the fence and looking closely at Ted Cruz. Several said they liked Ben Carson but were unnerved by the retired neurosurgeon's lack of knowledge on economic issues in the most recent GOP debate. It was not clear if Trump lost anyone in Iowa with his 95-minute stemwinder. But he might have.

One undecided voter in attendance, who did not wanted to be quoted by name, shook his head at me as Trump was rambling away. “I’m just not sure this guy can win,” he said.